In-person, face-to-face meetings often involve exchange of information in various forms and activity in such meetings can be very dynamic with participants potentially referring to different items at the same time. Participants of the meeting can share their files, discuss content with interactive gestures and voice tones, take their own notes, and keep a copy of documents shared. Existing conferencing systems have difficulty in simulating in-person meetings. There is a growing need to for a conferencing method via a communications network that simulates this and other types of dynamic activity among meeting participants.
Online conferencing often involves the participants logging into a web site hosted by a third-party web server. Sharing of a document usually passes via a centralized server and involves one participant uploading the document to the web file server/storage container, which then distributes the document to other participants. The use of the third-party web server to share documents may be undesirable due to concerns related to privacy, conservation of server-side resources, etc. There is also a continuing need for a conferencing method and system that addresses these and other concerns.